It's a thriller, it's science fiction, it's heart-warming family drama - Frequency has a little something for everyone.  And most compelling, it engages in fantasy wish fulfillment - what if, the film asks, you could go back and change the things that had gone wrong in your life?  What if you could fix them?

As the story opens, John Sullivan (James Caviezel) is being left by his wife.  And no wonder.  John, a cop, is a driven, bitter burnout case.  But that's all about to change.  John lives in the house he grew up in and happens across his father's old ham radio. 

John turns on the radio during a time of major sunspot activity so fierce that Northern Lights are being seen as far south as New York City.  Sunspots play tricks on radio waves, and such sunspot activity hasn't been seen for thirty years.

Next thing you know, John is talking on the radio to -- his father, who died thirty years ago.

Dad Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) was a firefighter who died in a warehouse fire when John was a little boy.   Conversing with the Frank Sullivan he's met on the radio, John realizes that Dad is talking to him from the day before the warehouse fire. 

Frank, of course, doesn't believe a word of this wild story, but John urgently warns him about the fire, and the next day when Frank is in the middle of the warehouse and at a decision point, he remembers the plea to 'go the other way' - and he does.

Poof.  The past has been changed.  Now John is living in a world where his father died just a few years ago from cancer. 

Unfortunately, that's not all that's been changed.  In the Before version of reality there was a serial killer called The Nightingale Killer who killed three nurses and was never caught.  In this version of reality, the Nightingale Killer killed ten nurses - and one of them was Frank's wife and John's mom Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell). 

Julia is long-dead in John's world, but still alive in Frank's, so father and son must work together across time to catch the killer and save mom's life.

The fictional science 'rules' of this movie have time tracking the same back then and now, so that if son radios father the next day in his time, it's next day for dad as well.  That's a smart scripting decision that enhances the drama, because it means that if John and Frank make a mistake, they can't go back and fix it. 

And they do make mistakes.  At least one more nurse bites the dust that they are unable to save, and Frank winds up a suspect in the serial killings. 

The cooperation across time to catch a killer notion is intriguing enough, but when you add in the refinement of an adult son interacting with the father who died when he was a young boy, that adds layers of nuance.

Neat movie - exciting and thought-provoking at the same time.

Back to Joyce's Pix of the Flix